04 November 2010

The silent, the hidden, and the lawless

Rather that declare once and for all what the best definition of “supernatural” is, we can try to distinguish between at least three possibilities:

The silent: things that have absolutely no effect on anything that happens in the world.

The hidden: things that affect the world only indirectly, without being immediately observable themselves.

The lawless: things that affect the world in ways that are observable (directly or otherwise), but not subject to the regularities of natural law.

A problem that I see is the difficulty of distinguishing “the lawless” from the rare and / or the complex.

For us to determine if there are underlying regularities, we often need a large number of observations. But there are some events we just cannot conjure up on a whim, and these rare events may be important.

And causal chains can be so complicated that we can’t necessarily parse them out in law-like terminology.